Jimmy Herring: Talkin' Blues, Bluegrass and More

The spark of bringing together unusual combinations, like a classically trained bluegrass fiddler, a Cameroonian bassist, and a high energy guitarist, could have resulted in a musical culture clash, but for Jimmy Herring the bet paid off. While he might be modest and deferential on a personal level, his latest album is bold and expansive. It reveals a musician and composer comfortable tackling a wide array of styles and moods.

"I thought of the studio itself an instrument, and I wanted to see what it was capable of and not worry about doing it live," that's how Jimmy Herring described his approach to his 2008 debut album, Lifeboat when we spoke in 2011. That same attitude, coupled with the willingness of his label, Abstract Logix, to trust his artistic vision, hire a gifted producer, and bring together world class guest musicians from extraordinarily diverse backgrounds, is the genesis of Subject To Change Without Notice (Abstract Logix, 2012,) his recently released tour de force.

All About Jazz: I was struck by how wide-ranging and dissimilar the musical styles are on this album, and yet it is so cohesive and has this organic feel. It's much more than just a collection of interesting tunes. So I'm curious if you have the feeling that you achieved something special this time out?

Jimmy Herring: When you're this close to it, it's hard to know, but you're hoping for something like that. I just know that John Keane, who produced this album, is someone I've wanted to work with for a long time. I did work with him on an album he produced for Widespread Panic, and he's a friend of mine.

So when I went in to talk to him, I had most of the music, and clearly this was going to be something completely different, so I asked him, "John do you ever coproduce records?" He said, "Yeah man, I would be up for that."

But the longer I talked to him about it, the more I realized I didn't want to coproduce the album. I wanted him to produce it, but I wanted the final say on my own performances. When you work with producers they sometimes make you keep stuff that you know you can do better.

Of course sometimes they have to do that because the artist will drive them out of their mind trying to make things perfect. So I said, "Look John, I don't want any production credit on this record, I'm not the producer, I want you to produce, but please let me have the final say about my own performances." He said, "Sure, we can do that."

He was very patient with me, and he let me do things the way I wanted to do them. But at the same time, he produced the record, and he was an invaluable catalyst for many of the performances on this record. He helped me put things together and I bounced ideas off of him. Whenever I would hit a wall, he had all kinds of great suggestions to help me get out of the rut I was facing.

So I knew we had something fairly special because I know how good he is, and I know how good the other musicians on this project are. But at one point I was a little worried because he said, "Man, you know every song on this album is coming from a completely different place."

AAJ: That's part of the beauty of this album.

JH: Thank you, but strangely enough it wasn't intentional, it just happened that way. When it came time to choose the order of the songs, I started looking at them and thinking about the order. I did it one way, using the tempo. I didn't want to have two songs following each other with the same tempo. And I did it another way, by style-I didn't want to have two funk tunes, or two jazz tunes, or two simply singer-songwriter type tunes right next to each other. And interestingly, it ended up being about the same order each time. It only took me five minutes to figure out the order of the songs.

It wasn't intended, but we ended up jumping genres each time. John didn't think there was anything bad about that, he just pointed it out to me. It's weird, it was just happening subconsciously, and it kind of sums up the way we look at music. Which is, we just don't look at music in terms of labels-it's all music. It didn't seem important to make this a rock record, or a jazz record, or a guitar record, or a saxophone record or whatever. We just like music, and I guess that's where this was coming from.

AAJ: That's interesting, because when I listened to it and heard how diverse it was in mood and style, I thought it was fitting that you did a cover from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol, 1967). Like your album, that album has all these wildly different songs from all over the place, and yet it has this cohesive, totally organic feel. Both albums had great producers who are also musicians, so it is really fascinating to learn that is just kind of happened that way. What did you learn from John Keane making this record?

JH: One important thing was just to trust him. In fact, working with him on the Widespread Panic album I had learned to trust him, so that's why I came back to him. They had already made several records with him and I was impressed with his style of production.

He would ask me to try something that I didn't know I was capable of, and normally I might have said, "Man that's crazy, I'm not doing that." But I've learned to trust him. For instance, on the song "Kaleidoscope Carousel" he wanted me to go into the room with the amp and do some long sustaining feedback notes, and he wanted me to ignore the harmony. You know, when the harmony moves, my tendency is to move with it. You spend a lot of your time as a musician developing so you can make the changes, but he would say, "Jimmy, just try ignoring the harmony, you know when the chords move, don't move with them, just stay where you are."

I said, "Ignore the harmony, I don't know if I can do that, but I'll try." But he had a vision I wasn't aware of. So he had me record five or six guitar tracks where I was just holding long notes and not paying attention to the harmony. I didn't realize he was planning on playing all of them at the same time. So I took a different approach on each one and then I came back into the control room and he played all six of them at the same time. I thought, whoa, this sounds like a bizarre symphony of guitars. Every note of it was improvised, and I had no notion of what he was up to. So that's the intro to "Kaleidoscope Carousel."